That old headspace, that old heartspace
Climbing out of the pit of my grief and into the body that is my life
Dearest,
1.
When my grandfather died, it was a singularly devastating moment of my life.
It happened in a sterile hospital room, the kind of room where time stretches thin, where the smell of antiseptic clings to everything. I was there, watching as nurses performed their desperate ritual, their hands moving with the detached urgency of those who’ve done this too many times before. I heard his ribs crack beneath their hands—a sound that would echo in my mind for years and years. They were trying to bring him back—to keep him tethered to this world—and at that moment, I felt something in me fracture, a split as real as the breaking of his bones.
2.
My father has always been a mercurial man, a whirlwind of emotions that could shift from thunderous anger to booming laughter in the span of a heartbeat. His feelings have always filled the spaces we occupied together, casting long shadows. But on that day, I saw something I had never seen before—my father, a man so full of life’s extremes, brought low by that even he could not contain.
It wasn’t the stoic agony you might expect from someone used to bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders. No—this was an explosion of grief that seemed to shake the very air around us. There was a helplessness in his eyes that I had never seen before, which cut deeper than I could have imagined.
To witness someone who has been a figure of authority for most of my life in this state was a different kind of pain, one that doubled what I was already feeling. I had always seen him as a force of nature, unpredictable but undeniably powerful. Yet here he was, laid bare by the same force that had taken my grandfather from us. Seeing him try to operate within the confines of this emotion, one that couldn’t be laughed away or raged against, was like watching a storm break over a mountain—relentless, unstoppable, and devastatingly final.
How do you reconcile the image of a father who has always been larger than life with the reality of his vulnerability? The roles we played shifted, if only for a moment. I was no longer just his child—I was a witness to his deepest sorrow.
3.
After—I had to walk through those cold, echoing corridors, clutching a piece of paper that felt like a death sentence—because it was. We needed doctors’ signatures, someone’s pen scrolling down the page signing off my grandfather’s life—a simple formality, but every step felt like I was moving through molasses. My face was wet with big, ugly tears. There was a staggering urge to disappear, to be swallowed whole by the ground. But instead, I walked, and I cried, and I asked for signatures. It felt obscene, to function when all I wanted was to disintegrate. Every step was a struggle against the want to collapse.
No one prepares you for the direct aftermath, for the hour that follows the final breath. That hour is different from all the others. It is an hour out of time, suspended between life and death, where the weight of loss hasn’t fully settled, and yet you are thrust into the most mundane of tasks. There will be hours for mourning, endless hours that stretch into days and weeks, but that first hour is something else entirely. It is an hour when grief hasn’t yet taken its full shape. You become a ghost moving through the motions, performing tasks that seem impossible in their ordinariness. Sign this, call that, arrange this—it all feels so wrong, so utterly at odds with the enormity of what has just happened.
4.
My grandfather was a quiet, steady force in my life. His love was uncomplicated by the expectations and disappointments that often characterise relationships with parents. It was a love that was patient, forgiving, and dare I say—softer?
It’s been fifteen years since he died. I’ve written so many poems about him that I’ve started to call them ‘grandfather poems.’ It makes me think how some losses linger far beyond the moment of their occurrence. I am not the same person I was when I started writing these poems, and yet—
5.
Last Sunday, during a writing session, there was a prompt that pulled me back into that old headspace, that old heartspace. It was based on a poem by Anne Boyer, which was steeped in repetition, and it made me think about how grief is, in its own way, a cycle that loops back on itself, time and time again.
It was surreal—I have been writing about love and joy in the past year, and here I was, birthing another grandfather poem. Oh, to be loved wildly—how my life unfolds in proportion to how willing I am to face this world that chafes—
All of that to say—what was curious was that I was able to write about it in a way that honoured both the pit that I have climbed out of and the person that I am now. I feel like—I can maybe finally put it aside, you know? Not to say that I’m done with it all—only that perhaps there is more space now for something else.
I’ve carried these poems with me for years and years, and it seems the time has come for me to gather them all together and perhaps let go—
Finally, a poem:
What resembles the grave but isn’t
Anne BoyerAlways falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one; sometimes falling into a hole within a hole, or many holes within holes, getting out of them one after the other, then falling again, saying “this is not your grave, get out of the hole”; sometimes being pushed, saying “you can not push me into this hole, it is not my grave,” and getting out defiantly, then falling into a hole again without any pushing; sometimes falling into a set of holes whose structures are predictable, ideological, and long dug, often falling into this set of structural and impersonal holes; sometimes falling into holes with other people, with other people, saying “this is not our mass grave, get out of this hole,” all together getting out of the hole together, hands and legs and arms and human ladders of each other to get out of the hole that is not the mass grave but that will only be gotten out of together; sometimes the willful-falling into a hole which is not the grave because it is easier than not falling into a hole really, but then once in it, realizing it is not the grave, getting out of the hole eventually; sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another; sometimes surveying the landscape of holes and wishing for a high quality final hole; sometimes thinking of who has fallen into holes which are not graves but might be better if they were; sometimes too ardently contemplating the final hole while trying to avoid the provisional ones; sometimes dutifully falling and getting out, with perfect fortitude, saying “look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t!”
Yours,
T.